AMD Athlon 5350 (Kabini AM1 Platform) FS1b APU Review (w/ Sapphire R7 240 Low Profile)

1. Introduction2. Kabini and the AM1 Platform3. Testing Methodology4. Tests: CPU Productivity5. Tests: CPU General Usage6. Tests: System Performance7. Tests: Gaming Performance (w/ Sapphire R7 240 Low Profile)8. Tests: AM1 Platform Performance9. Technical: Power Consumption & Temperatures10. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

Media Encoding – Handbrake

We measure the time that Handbrake takes to convert our 60MB (4 minutes and 4 seconds) 1280 x 720 test file from MKV to MP4 format. Conversion priority was set to ‘High'. This is a typical task for users requiring media playback on mobile devices.

The Athlon 5350 manages to convert our 720P MKV file quicker than real-time. Averaging around 45 FPS (almost 2x speed), conversion of a hundred-minute film would be a lengthy wait.

HD (1080P) Media Playback

We measure the CPU utilisation when playing our 1080P MKV bluray rip of The Dark Knight.

CPU utilisation when playing back high bit-rate HD content hovers around 38%. With their low TDPs, Kabini parts have strong potential for usage in HTPC environments.

We initially used VLC media player but the software would provide choppy playback at certain points and GPU usage was almost idle. Using Windows Media Player with the relevant codec packages allowed for perfectly smooth playback thanks to increased emphasis on the GPU's performance.

WinRAR

WinRAR’s built in benchmark and hardware test can help us outline the archival performance offered by the Athlon 5350 APU.

Archival performance is respectable for the entry-level APU. A WinRAR resulting speed of 2,140KB/s is likely to be sufficient for many general tasks where the archive sizes do not extend to many Gigabytes of data.

As a point of reference, the A10-6800K ‘Richland' APU delivers a speed of around 4,000KB/s.

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